Re: Need advice on ZFS

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Ted Spradley <tsprad%talent-free-studios.com@localhost> writes:

> Should I trust NetBSD's ZFS with my user's data?
>
> I understand that our ZFS isn't being kept up as well as FreeBSD's,
> that's why I have FreeBSD on one box on my home network, but I'd like
> to keep all *my* hosts on NetBSD (my users run Windows). I have one
> user (my wife) who has over 5 Terabytes of stuff she's very protective
> of, but relies on me to protect it. 

You obviously need to be creating multiple backups and taking at least
some of them off site.  That's true regardless of filesystem.   I would
say your exposure from all things not zfs flakiness is far greater than
your exposure from zfs issues.

I have been using zfs for about a year, on NetBSD 10.  It mostly works
well, but I find that the system locks up and needs to be power cycled
occasionally.  However, it has done great at not losing data. The system
has 32GB RAM, and it seems other people do not see this (on reasonable
memory systems).    My 4 GB xen dom0 is also troubled, but 4GB is widely
viewed as not enough for ZFS.

> When I set up the file server I specified compatibility=2020. Would our
> ZFS understand that?

zpool get all on my pool shows

poolA  feature@async_destroy          enabled                        local
poolA  feature@empty_bpobj            active                         local
poolA  feature@lz4_compress           active                         local
poolA  feature@multi_vdev_crash_dump  enabled                        local
poolA  feature@spacemap_histogram     active                         local
poolA  feature@enabled_txg            active                         local
poolA  feature@hole_birth             active                         local
poolA  feature@extensible_dataset     enabled                        local
poolA  feature@embedded_data          active                         local
poolA  feature@bookmarks              enabled                        local
poolA  feature@filesystem_limits      enabled                        local
poolA  feature@large_blocks           enabled                        local

not sure if that helps.